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China's First Lunar Satellite Sends Back Pictures
Fantastic Lad writes "Chinese leaders hailed images sent back from the country's first lunar satellite on Monday, saying they showed their nation had thrust itself into the front ranks of global technological powers. China plans to launch its third manned rocket, Shenzhou VII, into space in October 2008 and may send an astronaut on a space walk, a Shanghai paper said. But a space official downplayed plans to put a man on the moon."There are no plans at the moment to send anyone on to the moon. I've heard of foreign reports which say China will put a man on the moon by 2020, but I don't know of such a plan," said Sun Laiyan, head of the China National Space Administration. "Please don't give us any more pressure. But I'm confident one day we'll put an astronaut on the moon," he told a news conference."
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Congradulations! Science has no political boundaries. I just hope they are willing to share their results, much like we and the ESA has.
Everyone knows the only reason China's putting so much effort into examining the moon is in the hopes of finding "Made in Taiwan" written in its dust.
Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what your country did to you
This is independently corroborated evidence , that the Moon is made of cheese. Oh the Power of Cheese !!!
They just ripped off existing American photos of the Moon.
Isn't there supposed to be an American flag on this side of the moon?
Laiyan went on to explain that a Chinese-made lunar lander had already been designed and built. Unfortunately, further refinements are required since the taikonaut would die from lead poisoning before reaching the Van Allen belt.
China is now trying to downplay their wanting to send ppl to the moon. Basically, they talked it up, but they are finding that it is pushing the west to get back their very quick. So now, they are saying, "ah no. We no go, so you do not have to". Gut feeling is that it is best for the west to continue to go there.
But catching up!
saying they showed their nation had thrust itself into the front ranks of 1969
Ok, the US put a man on the moon in a really short span of time. We even got a whole flurry to repeat the trip in the following years. So why is it that we can't seem to get anything done with that level of efficiency again? Yes I know there is the lack of money which is a huge problem but you might think that NASA would spend what they could on getting someone exceedingly charismatic to work Congress for the dough.
If NASA were to start hyping themselves up again (and not relying on past glories), we could really start to see some great achievements coming out of those brilliant people again.
Which brings us to China. This new endeavor is a point of pride for the country and its government much like it was for us 40 years ago. I'm actually going to root for China in the hope that it will get we Americans to start looking back into space.
Does the WVU in your name refer to an educational institution?
Seriously, get a refund.
until they find something interesting. At that point, I expect it to be skipped. Keep in mind that while the chinese ppl are fine, the gov. is still the same one that has always been in place; secretive and having intentions other than what is said (i.e. they are like any other gov).
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Congradulations! Science has no political boundaries. My father spend at least 40 year for Chinese space area. Wei Xiang
Isn't that Niel Goldman's face??
So basically, -1 troll/offtopic is really slashdots way of saying "I hate that you thought of something before me."
Well going on the moon shouldn't be to hard for China, all they have to do is put a chinese over a chinese over a chinese over a ...
I'm disappointed that the images aren't censored.
that we all helped pay for this by purchasing endless amounts of plastic tat and other cheap Chinese goods. So let's all take pride in those moon shots.
Although the unfiltered sunlight has probably bleached them all white by now.
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Yes, it has a VERY thin atmosphere. More importantly, it does blow around there. Even more so, when a meteor hits it (frequently), or a space craft (not so frequently, but about to change).
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Bender: Fine. I'll go build my own lunar lander! With blackjack! And hookers! In fact, forget the lunar lander! And the blackjack! Ah, screw the whole thing.
Oops, wrong thread....
Developers: We can use your help.
We are sending satellites to the far reaches of the solar system and beyond. We have rovers exploring Mars as we speak, which send back spectacular pictures and have performed far beyond the original specifications. We have a telescope in space that monitors distant galaxies. We have intercepted and collected samples from a comet. I fail to see why it is big news when the Chinese replicate a feat that was done nearly half a century ago by two other countries, one of which has sent humans there multiple times using computers less powerful than some people's cell phones. Are they also going to tell their people they were the first ones there and everything else is "Capitalist Propaganda"?
Well, I see the comments section for this story has turned into 'let's laugh at the foreign people' central.
Where the fuck are you guys when the stories about the one-laptop-per-child plan roll in?
All right, who gave the Chinese a copy of the "Moon is Harsh Mistress". In 10 years they won't need an Air Force, just a moon rock chucker.
Luna 10 was the first probe of any kind to go into Lunar orbit (not just a fly-by). I'm assuming that the Chinese probe being referred to as a "satellite" indicates that it went into orbit, which Luna 3 did not. Luna 10 was the first probe to go into orbit around the moon, in 1966.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luna_10
With the first link, the chain is forged.
In the US and USSR people were poor when we went to the moon. I know the Democrats say that crap in US whenever we do something like that. They always claim "what about the poor people?" Which really means "what do I get out of it." Democrats don't understand the number of jobs and the great technology that come from these projects.
First, I would like to point out that I am happy to see a lack of knee-jerk reactions to this news. By that I mean the typical, "anything foreign is crap and evil" posting that sometimes crop up around here. Secondly, I also hope that this puts some focus behind our own space program. Another poster mentioned that way back when, when the US went to the moon, NASA was solely focused on the task and thus was able to complete it in a reasonable amount of time. Over the years, NASA has no single goal, no drive and no focus. I believe that the individual employees at NASA are motivated and clever people who happed to work for a employer with no direction. Just imagine if your company had no plan at all, nothing you were trying to do, just several pet projects to work on and only a small portion of your companies monies going to it. You would be out of business in no time. Why should NASA be different? I am not saying NASA should have only 1 goal. I am saying that NASA should be linear. Put the resources behind a large goal and achieve it, then just keep a smaller amount of money there to maintain it while diverting the main bulk of the funding to the next major goal. Anyhow NASA..I say do that instead of what you are doing, since what you do now isnt working. Oh....and I say.. good job China. You have come a long way.
The reason is that once out of the earth's gravity well, it is the same diff to get to one place or another (assuming that time does not matter, such as for cargo). OTH, to land on mars, we can use the atmosphere to slow down the craft (via parachutes or even with wings). OTH, the moon will require a FULL LANDER all the way down. Of course, take off is much easier from the moon, but in terms of simply putting something on the surface, mars IS easier.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
America, like nearly all of Europe, hides ALL sorts of information. W. has been spying on Americans for sometime, ILLEGALLY (and wants to get off scot-free). That makes W NO different than Chinese leaders. The ONLY difference between a "democratic entity" (really, it is a republic), is that we get to vote out the ppl that we do not like every so often. But if you look at how America has behaved over the last 6 years ( e.g. holding American citizens in Gitmo sets a precedent that other Americans can be held), we are not that much different than china. Keep in mind that even in America it took massive corruption on a scale not seen in America to cause a number of republicans to lose. It was not really the war alone that caused this. In fact, the war helped the republicans during the 2004 elections.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Why don't we push the bar further and start working on a manned mission to Mars? If not that then perhaps other big and useful things like a space elevator.
Did any other country(like china, japan) find evidence of US having landed in moon? I was just wondering about conspiracy theory that US never landed on moon.
When a thief sees a saint, all he sees are his pockets!
In other news, people reached the deepest point in the ocean in 1960, never to return again. The craft they used could be replicated today, but why? The moon and the Mariana trench are places, like the top of the Everest, where people go because it's there. People revisit the Everest because it's cheap enough to be done by hobbyists, or by people with some sort of sponsor. Reaching the moon would be too expensive for a hobbyist or someone writing a National Geographic article.
There's no motivation to return to the moon, there's no economic return, and no scientific studies that cannot be done cheaper in other ways. Until we find something that cannot be done on earth cheaper, no one will build a moon colony.
A 1960's radio, tv or computer costs nothing in today's dollars, and yet a 1960's moon lander is impossible to make
The electronics in the Apollo project would be ridiculously cheap today, compared to the 1960s, but the same cannot be said of the titanium, stainless steel, liquid hydrogen, or so many other exotic materials used. Not to mention that most of the cost in a space mission is labor, and an engineer's salary is much more today than the $6000/year or so they got in 1969.
Have you ever looked at pictures of the first moon lander? Do you actually believe it was capable of taking off from the moon once it got there?
What do the pictures of the lunar lander prove to you? Are you such a capable engineer that you can state flatly that it couldn't take off from the moon just by looking at pictures of it? I have seen more detailed descriptions than outside pictures, and it seems quite able to perform as stated.
And why is it they never use the most powerful telescopes to show the landing site on the moon?
What for? Why would you believe in such a photograph, if you don't believe in the photographs they brought back from the moon itself? You would claim any photograph taken by a telescope is a fake anyway. No one will waste valuable telescope time just to try to satisfy people like you.
I think this sort of belief in the moon landings is about as ridiculous as belief in religion
And I think that belief that the moon landings were faked is more ridiculous than belief in religion. Because belief in religion is motivated by one of the strongest instincts we have: fear of death. Most of us aren't willing to accept that at some time we just cease to exist and we want to believe in something that remains after we die. OTOH, belief that moon landings were faked is based just on envy, the unwillingness to accept that some people can be more intelligent and more persistent than we are, that they can work together to accomplish a task that seems so difficult.
Tell Bush that Osama is on the moon with WMDs. We will get there again.
"once out of the earth's gravity well, it is the same diff to get to one place or another"
/landing module for any Mars mission will be far larger than that required for a Moon mission (it's got to contend with the fact that there IS an atmosphere for a start), and (d) entry speed for a Mars mission is massively higher than a Moon landing due to the fact that you have to be going so much faster just to get to Mars in any 'reasonable' time frame.
A journey of a few days vs. a journey of a few weeks (insanely optimistic) to eighteen months (far more realistic.) If one of your success criteria is having live astronauts at the end of the trip then I'm putting my money on the latter being the one that's orders of magnitude harder.
"to land on mars, we can use the atmosphere to slow down the craft"
(a) Mars' atmosphere is very thin, (b) its gravity is far higher than the moon, (c) the crew capsule
Handling a Mars orbital insertion and landing is hugely more technically challenging than a Moon landing for all of those reasons, and more. The science and engineering behind designing parachutes that could slow a capsule down to landing speeds alone is daunting. Don't forget that due to (a) they have to be enormous compared to parachutes used on the Earth, and they have to open in such a way that the mechanical stresses don't tear them or turn the capsule occupants into paté.
The Moon is easy in comparison. There's no atmosphere to worry about so the lander was delicate and above all light, and the Moon's gravity is low enough that you can gently touch down using just a single moderately powered descent engine.
The gift of death metal does not smile on the good looking.
What a great idea! Let's land a man on the moon! Too bad we didn't think of this 40 years ago...oh wait WE DID! Welcome to the 1960's China! Glad you caught up to us. Maybe if you switch gears really quickly, you can invent the VW Beetle bus too. How about a concert in on some farmland in New York?
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What do you make of the Mars rovers? Real? Computer generated? If it was fake in the first place, why go back? If it was just to intimidate the USSR with regard to our missile technology, that's a stupid plan since they beat us there using unmanned spacecraft.
What evidence would make you believe we went there and can you think of a good reason for using NASA resources, which probably bill somewhere in the $200/hr range, to get you the evidence you desire?
The Chinese and the Japanese have quite the long-time rivalry. I suspect that the hi-def pictures Japan's lunar orbiter sent home a few weeks back did not go without notice in China. What a crummy way to have the wind taken out of China's sails barely a month before the completion of their own lunar mission. --And the political models of each country would certainly support another space race.
I'd be excited to see some sort of space exploration competition between Communist China and Democratic (sic) Japan start to kindle. That'd be really fun in a Game On kind of way.
I wonder if the first Asian to walk on the moon will be wearing a space suit or a, ahem, mobile suit.
-FL
That image from China - if you look closley at the bottom-right, doesn't have a Google Earth logo? LOL :--) Nice try China. Stick to making plates and teacups. Maybe you can make a lander from all of the toys being sent back to you. Name suggestion - call your moon lander "The pb Express" - for those without chemistry knowledge, 'pb' is the atomic symbol for Lead.
Stop by and watch a Christmas movie, commercial or cartoon! -->http://www.XmasDVD.com
Mod parent up anyone? PS: I don't necessarily agree with your point (d); it's entirely possible to slow the ship down before an attempted landing/orbital insertion. It may even be possible to devise some sort of a reverse gravitational slingshot effect, thus leveraging Mars' gravity to slow the craft down to a reasonable post-traveling speed.
I just looked through your posts, I think you may need to see your doctor and ask him to recommend a good Psychotherapist for you.
The sentiment represents Americans' worry about a credible up-and-coming competitor who has the drive and the pocket to surpass what Americans, not what have accomplished by them.
While China has produced large number of engineers and scientists and has the ability to imitate quickly, they lacks creativity and they are unable to retain the best. For example, most top rank students from top rank universities like Beijing University, Tsinghua, etc. ends up as foreign students in American universities where they made greater scientific discoveries than those happening inside China. And most of them have acquired greencards and U.S. citizenship.
Not even China and India, but even Japan and Europe cannot compete with the U.S. in terms of retaining the best minds, due to various economical, cultural and political reasons. Maybe your HR manager is right: the most important assets are human beings.
If the U.S. government made fewer mistakes like pissing off Dr. Tsien Hsue Shen (who, in retaliation, went back to China to boostrap their missile and rocket programme) or suing Wen Ho Lee, the American people have no worry about their competitiveness.
Our core competitiveness is our green card.
Oh right, never.
Pioneer - the path to success is built on failures
Ranger - shoot the moon, literally
Lunar Orbiter - look before you leap (and risk a manned vehicle)
Surveyor - practice makes perfect (again without risking a manned lander)
Most of these occurred in parallel with the equivalent Soviet programs (links are at the bottom of the above Wikipedia pages). Give the huge failure rate with both countries' programs (unmanned), I consider who managed to succeed first at each individual goal to be more a matter of luck. (The U.S. essentially "won" the race to put a man on the moon when the equivalent Soviet rocket blew up. The Soviets then decided they couldn't catch up with Apollo, gave up, and concentrated on a robotic mission to return samples.)
Oh, I agree with you entirely. There are three methods currently in use for slowing spaceships down, but unfortunately they all have their own quite serious down-sides.
The most common is atmospheric breaking, but as mentioned before that has issues with how thing Mars' atmosphere is, how heavy the entry vehicle has to be due to the stresses involved and the added weight of the chutes and heat shield, and how difficult it is considering the extreme speeds involved in a Mars insertion.
You can use orbital dynamics to slow yourself down. This is typically done on missions to the outer planets, but unfortunately takes much longer than a direct insert due to the additional orbits and manouvers needed to complete deceleration. This is a big problem for any manned mission.
Finally you can just flip your ship 180 degrees and fire the main engines in a deceleration burn. This is effective, but means that you have to take twice as much fuel with you as you'd otherwise need. This is a BIG issue for any future Mars missions, as we don't yet know how we're going to drag the bare minimum of what we need over that distance and time period.
It's a very interesting set of engineering problems that we still need to solve for Mars missions. I hope that we keep working at them until we find solutions.
The gift of death metal does not smile on the good looking.
We had landed men on the Moon.
Back in the 1960's, Mao ignored Apollo entirely. Unlike the USSR (which reported on it and congratulated us), the PRC's position was
that it never happened.
higher resolution image
There is a spark in every single flame bait point.
That doesn't get ME really any closer to going to Mars.
Please clarify. We need major breakthrus before space is economical for the average joe. Wait for tech to catch up in general. I doubt merely going up there over and over will produce needed technology.
Human collection gathering is far superior to robotic collection. The rovers on Mars slowly drive up to...
You are confusing speed with economics. Yes, robot explorers are slow, but the turtose beats the hare when you cost it. (And faster bots are possible with more money.)
Do you really think that NASA would only send people that know how to fly the spacecraft to Mars and not send any scientists or at least tell the astronauts what to look for?
Sending a geologist on Apollo 17 did NOT really seem to make signif difference. Like I said, you really don't know what you are looking at until dissecting it back in an expensive earth lab. Random collection via robots is far cheaper than random collection via humans. Life-support and safey expensives are just too damned expensive compared to robots. Plus, robots can much more easily revisit the promising sites after earth-lab results are in. A manned mission to Mars is likely a one-shot deal.
I've been in a lot of robot-vs-human debates. The robots easily win if the metric is science-per-dollar (barring some pie-in-sky breakthru). I hate to dissappoint you.
Table-ized A.I.
Was anyone else put off by the editorial tone of this article? I would like to think Reuters could serve this story up in a more objective fashion.
Did they also have a convincing explanation for the many clearly non-terrestrial rock samples the astronauts brought back with them? I'm curious how they explained those away.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
That high-res picture is much clearer. Am I the only one who thinks they can see a face on the moon in them? Look at the bottom right hand section. What looks like a side-profile of large, thick lips and an afro hairdo.
I away consipiracy theorists' take on this.
If the pattern goes 9am, 10am, 11am, why isn't noon 12am?
Damn! Wimmen...
You can't love them, and you can't shoot em in the head.
- Ecsad Essemal
The Hexadecimal TV-REMOTE!
even if we pointed the hubble space telescope at the lunar landing site, it still wouldn't be powerful enough to resolve anything left there.
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
I have heard that a "couple of weeks" trip time to Mars is quite possible if you use an ion drive of sufficient size. A low acceleration applied continuously over a long period can work surprisingly well. This would also handle the deceleration issue, as you'd spend half the trip with the engine pointed behind you, and the other half with it in front.
Also, any such mission really shouldn't have the same vehicle serving as both interplanetary transport and lander/launcher (or even just together). All three tasks should be handled by separate vehicles with well-focused designs. And you definitely should be sending all such extra hardware as the landers, launchers, and surface habitat ahead of any manned mission.
Of course, this is certainly still more difficult than going to the moon, in terms of the size of the problem. But if we take the same approach as above to going to the moon, rather than another throwaway 1-shot method like the Apollo program was, then Mars will really just be another increment, and thus "easier" than getting to the Moon was in the first place.
"Orthodoxy is unconsciousness" - Orwell